The Editor's Desk

When nearly everything you do in your line of work involves communicating, suddenly not being able to do so really makes you feel kind of useless.

The Desert Dispatch got hit pretty hard in the communications outage today. Our phones went out, our Internet went out, and our company cell phones went out. We couldn’t access our customer service database to deal with problems. We couldn’t even post about the telecommunications problems on our Web site (not that most Barstow residents would have been able to read it anyway). We were as cut off as everybody else.

I thought I’d be able to work around the issue because I have a cable modem and phone service at home, but when I ran home to post a quick news story about the communications outage, I discovered cable phone/Internet service was out as well.

So for four hours I simply sent Aaron Aupperlee and Jason Smith loose on the city to get all information that they could and then … just kind of sat here. I couldn’t call the two of them, so I trusted them to come back with good information. I couldn’t do anything. We were supposed to have a teleconference regarding a redesign of our Web site, but I couldn’t call in. Everything on my to-do list was shot. There is hardly anything I do as the editor of the newspaper that doesn’t incorporate telecommunications of some sort. Fortunately, some people on our staff had personal cell phones that still worked so we were able to contact a few folks outside Barstow to plan.

If you care at all, if we’re in a situation where we can’t design the Desert Dispatch here (and with communications down, we can’t — all our work is saved on a collective server and we can’t access it or print it), we send our page designers and sometimes even reporters to our sister paper the Daily Press in Victorville to make sure a newspaper comes out as usual. We’ve had to do so once before a couple of years ago due to a power outage. Fortunately our services came back around 2 p.m. and (knock on wood) don’t have to do so today.

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